About 1,800 charging ports for electric cars would be set up in Chinese capital as part of a study to work out a plan to phase out petrol and diesel vehicles. About 1,615 of these 1,895 charging ports will be installed in the area of administration offices in Beijing city's Tongzhou District, state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
By 2020, Tongzhou plans to build a charging port every two kilometers to provide better service to electric vehicles in the suburban district of Beijing. Currently, Tongzhou has 53 charging stations at expressway service areas and shopping malls, and another two for the district's 510 electric taxies. Beijing will move many of its administration offices out of the city center to the eastern suburbs, according to the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning in 2016.
Building the new administrative center will draw approximately four lakh urban residents from the city center to the suburban district, the commission said. The Chinese capital has sought to address its severe "urban diseases", such as congestion and pollution, by curbing population growth and moving facilities to nearby regions.
Earlier a Chinese official said China, the world's top automobile market, wants to ban the manufacturing and sales of cars running on traditional fuels as done by the UK and France. Xin Guobin, China's vice minister of industry and information technology said that Beijing had started research on a timetable to phase out production and sales of fossil fuel cars. While Xin gave no details on the timeframe, he said, "the measures would surely bring profound changes to the sector's development".
Many Chinese cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, have already imposed severe restrictions on sale of new cars to contain air pollution and to restrict traffic congestion. The minister's statement followed similar moves of several countries to end the era of gas-powered vehicles to cut emissions and reduce pollution.
In July, French Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot announced that France would end sales of petrol and diesel vehicles by 2040 as part of the country's plan to meet its targets under the Paris climate accord.
The same month, the British government followed suit with a similar plan eyeing 2040 as a deadline to stop sales of new fossil fuel cars. China has been implementing a slew of measures, including tax exemptions, discounts for car purchases and an order for government organisations to buy more new energy vehicles (NEVs).
Last year, China sold 507,000 NEVs, an increase of 53 percent year on year. Sales of pure electric vehicles surged 65.1 percent year on year to 409,000, accounting for 80 percent of new energy vehicle sales, the report said.
An earlier guideline by the State Council said China would build more than 12,000 new charging stations before 2020 to fulfil the demands of over 5 million NEVs. According to a roadmap compiled by the Society of Automotive Engineers of China, the share of NEVs sales should reach more than 40 percent of total auto sales by 2030.
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